The largest UAE airline Emirates unveiled information about the popularity of the Wi-Fi internet on its planes.
On average, 450 000 passengers connect Wi-Fi network during the flight every month in 2023. The number seems staggering, but actually only 10 percent of all Emirates’ passengers use this service.
Emirates increased the Wi-Fi internet’s popularity by 30% by making the service partially free for the members of its Skywards loylty program in 2023.
Now the service is the most popular on the routes to the Americas region. 20% of passengers connect to Wi-Fi onboard on these flights. On European and African routes the usage is over 11% of all passengers.
It means the lowest popularity of the Wi-Fi internet on Emirates’s planes is on flights to Asia. This phenomenon could be explained by the fact that passengers in developed Asian countries use high-speed internet on the ground, and slow, expensive internet on planes is not satisfied them.
Korean Air, the largest airline in South Korea, will introduce the Wi-Fi service on its first planes only in June 2023.
The equipment to provide internet access up in the air is not cheap. According to Emirates, it paid $300 million to equip its fleet of 250 planes.
